A fairly ordinary girl with an extraordinary love of life and words. I really can’t shut my brain off to what is wonderful and wonderous all around me. Friendly (most of the time), except at four in the morning when I wake up (and even then I’m generally affable), intensely curious, and trying to find a home for my YA novel. Any questions or just want to say ‘hi’ go ahead and drop me a note at heatherzundel [at] gmail [dot] com. I’d love hearing from you.

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Current Theme Song (aka what's playing on my ipod right now): No Light No Light by Florence + the Machine.

I could not be more delighted than I am to have Heather Dixon is doing a guest post on this blog today. She perfect for this because she is the author of Entwined, a fairy tale retelling of the 12 Dancing Princesses. So, she's legit. Annnnd she's a Disney fanatic ANNNNND she's an artist. Who works for Disney. This girl, she is great for this. Plus her blog his hilarious beyond reason. So I was skipping across clouds when she agreed to do a guest post. I let her have free reign on any topic on fairy tale art. And here she is!

Well it is quite an honor, Heather! Thanks for letting me be a part of this.

I
have to admit, it was difficult to pick from all the fairy tale
pictures I love and adore. The first one that came to mind, however:
Sheilah Beckett's rendition of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses".

Chances
are a lot of your readers have seen Sheilah Beckett's work--she's a
legend. She worked as an artist in advertising in the 1940s, working on
record albums and paperbacks, and illustrating fairy tale books on the
side. This is a spread from "The Twelve Dancing Princesses". I love
her style; so clean, with excellent composition, color, and design. I'm
in awe.

Truly what awes me the most is that Sheilah is still
alive, and she's still painting! She's in her 90's now, but that
hasn't stopped her from learning photoshop and going digital. What an
inspiration. I hope to be like that when I'm 90. You can read more
about Sheilah, and see more of her fairy-tale artwork here, or even find her on facebook.

Another piece I just love, that's stuck with me, is this Steampunk "Sleeping Beauty" piece, by Antonio Caparo.

Besides being just beautiful, and well-drawn, rendered,
designed, I love the story it tells. It has elements of a lot of fairy
tales in it--the bitten apple in the bulb behind her, the clock that
reads midnight, in the background...gosh, this picture is just
delicious!

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Lotte Reiniger. Mrs.
Reiniger made animations of shadow puppets during the first half of the
century, telling stories of Aladdin, Dr. Doolittle, and Cinderella.
They say she preceded Disney by 10 years with the multi-plane camera
and feature-length animations. Look at those puppets, though--they're
so intricate, each had 25-50 moving parts, connected together with lead
wires. It's so beautiful I could die.